June 13, 2004: Headlines: Staff: History: The Arizona Republic: Jay Heiler says "Bill Moyers' famous commercial featured a beautiful little tow-headed girl playing in a field of daisies, rudely overborne by a booming voice speaking a countdown, "Ten! Nine! Eight! and so on, until zero, when the child looked up. At that moment the viewer saw reflected in her innocent eye the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb"

Our debt to Bill MoyersFormer Peace Corps Deputy Director Bill Moyers leaves PBS next week to begin writing his memoir of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Read what Moyers says about journalism under fire, the value of a free press, and the yearning for democracy. "We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country," he warns, "or we'll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we'll not save democracy from its own inertia."

Jay Heiler says "Bill Moyers' famous commercial featured a beautiful little tow-headed girl playing in a field of daisies, rudely overborne by a booming voice speaking a countdown, "Ten! Nine! Eight! and so on, until zero, when the child looked up. At that moment the viewer saw reflected in her innocent eye the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb"

The 1964 presidential campaign is best viewed as one important television commercial and one important speech. (I was 4 years old at that time, growing up in the sticks 25 miles outside Cincinnati, but made detailed observation of all such matters.) Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater were the candidates, but the commercial and the speech were the work of neither.

The commercial was an LBJ campaign spot said to have been conceived by Bill Moyers, a man who would later make a big career in the news media during a time when the news media were hurting the country - a time we live in still.

Moyers' famous commercial featured a beautiful little tow-headed girl playing in a field of daisies, rudely overborne by a booming voice speaking a countdown, "Ten! Nine! Eight! and so on, until zero, when the child looked up. At that moment the viewer saw reflected in her innocent eye the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb.

Moyers' little commercial was a polemical bombshell of its own, ruthlessly positioning Goldwater's tough stance on Cold War foreign policy and national defense as risking the hell of nuclear war.

The speech in 1964 was titled "A Time for Choosing," and it was delivered by Ronald Reagan, who had his own media career going - in the entertainment media. The entertainment media hadn't done much to hurt the country at that point, in part because the insidious elements there had been caught out and brushed back by people like Reagan.

Soon, though, they would regroup and start making up for lost time, and they still are. (It's compelling evidence that God has a sense of humor that Ronald Reagan came out of Hollywood.) In any case, Reagan's televised speech in defense of Goldwater - and the conservative philosophy that Goldwater himself could not articulate quite so forcefully - marked the most defining moment in one of the most consequential political careers in American history.

There had never been a speech quite like it, and there hasn't been one since. Once he had given it, Reagan's fairly ordinary acting career was over and his singular journey in politics begun.

Sixteen years, four presidents and one badly conducted war later, Ronald Reagan himself was elected president. The same Cold War debate embodied by Moyers' commercial and Reagan's speech was still raging in American politics, with the Moyers Left more shrill than ever in demanding accommodation and cooperation with Soviet communism, and the Reagan Right insisting on stronger defense, fiercer resistance and no moderation in the defense of freedom. That debate marked the primary fault line in American politics throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and Reagan carried his side of it with the same fire and confidence that he had shown in that speech so long before.

He would carry it all the way across the goal line. No ear of man will hear him admit it, but history will record that Moyers was spectacularly wrong and Reagan was right. Soviet communism and its seven-decade reign of terror came crashing down shortly after the conclusion of the Reagan presidency, and eight years after Reagan had called the U.S.S.R. the "Evil Empire" in a speech to Christian evangelicals in Orlando.

When Reagan delivered that speech, the Moyers Left snapped into spasms of sophisticated loathing. Several years later, when Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher led a charge to position Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe with a flight time of minutes to Moscow, there was more outrage, more shrieks of protest, more demands for a "nuclear freeze" by assorted cranks, including John Kerry.

As all of this played out I was an ASU student, editing the campus paper as an undergraduate and then attending law school. For me and for an entire generation of Americans who became adults in the 1980s, Reagan's pointed contest with the American Left - in tax policy and other areas but mainly in Cold War defense strategy - was the defining point of political identity. I didn't know what a liberal was when I had gone away to college, and for a bit too long after getting there I was more in the habit of consuming beer and playing basketball than reading books. But even in my dimness, as I watched the leading voices of the Left counsel accommodation with Communist tyrants and break their picks on Reagan, I knew that whatever they were, I was not.

One of many paradoxes one can find in Reagan's political life is how strong was his following among young voters, given that he was not only Mr. Conservative but nearly 70 years old before he became president. This irritated and confounded liberals back then, too, but the explanation lies in his two predominant characteristics as a leader: a relentlessly positive view of the future and an utterly unshakable belief in freedom as the hope of mankind.

Freedom, of course, is highly valued, and perhaps most often misspent, by the young. But Reagan also knew and professed that there is an unavoidable moral dimension to freedom. Every time, he knew, is a time for choosing. He never stopped talking about that shining city on the hill - an image loaded heavily with moral obligation. And when you get down to the core of the man, in all things Reagan stood for freedom. Even the pitched fight over tax policy and the size and reach of the state - a fight which, like the Cold War, seems to endure across the decades - in Reagan's mind was less about economic theory than about individuals being free to seek their future without the burden of an oversized government.

Reagan will have his lofty place in history. He climbed to the highest point of his shining city on the hill, smiled and shouted "Freedom!," and the echo enveloped the world. He was the Freedom President. I thank him for mine.

Jay Heiler is a public affairs and communications consultant with APCO Worldwide in Phoenix. He is a former assistant attorney general, assistant editorial page editor of the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, and chief of staff to former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington.

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Story Source: The Arizona Republic

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